I had a hellish commute this morning, an evil commute, the kind of commute so filled with stupidity and selfishness and outright human sin that the only thing you can do is slowly dissolve in a acidic pool of seething, misdirected rage. This figures in a little later.

At work, my office is on the fifth floor, and the window looks out onto a small strip of grass that the building's owners had to install as a policy-mandated "public space." It's a good strip of grass, as strips of grass go, the length of the building and maybe fifteen feet wide. Nobody ever uses it because it's in shadow until two or three in the afternoon. After the rain LA has had recently, the grass has grown long and lush, and holds dew until at least lunchtime.

I had never paid the strip of grass much attention before.

But it turns out that stamping eight-foot-high profanities into a wet lawn is a great way to blow off a little steam.